Directed by Judd Apatow, The King of Staten Island follows Scott, played by Pete Davidson. A case of arrested development ever since his firefighter father died when he was seven. Scott is now in his mid-20s with very little achieved, chasing his dream of becoming a tattoo artist that appears never to come true.
His sister, played by Maude Apatow, is a complete opposite, ambitious, heading off to college. Scott still lives at home with his exhausted mother, an ER nurse, played by Marisa Tomei.
Scott’s days include smoking weed, hanging with the guys, Ricky Velez, Moises Arias, Lou Wilson, while secretly hooking up with his childhood friend Kelsey, played by Bel Powley.
Then, his mother starts dating a loudmouth firefighter named Ray, played by Bill Burr, which sets off a chain of events. Scott’s life spins and forces him to grapple with his grief and take the first tentative steps toward moving forward in life.
Also cast in the movie Steve Buscemi as Papa, a veteran firefighter who takes Scott under his wing. Pamela Adion also stars as Ray’s former wife, Gina.
Davidson is a former SNL member taking on Apatow’s movie as a comedy about laughter, loss, and love on Staten Island. Apatow, Davidson, and former SNL writer Dave Sirus wrote the script.
Directed by Tony Cervone, SCOOB! follows our favorite hero, Scooby-Doo, in the first full-length, theatrical animated Scooby-Doo adventure, which reveals how he and his best friend Shaggy became two of the world’s most beloved crime busters.
The film is streaming on Amazon and other outlets.
The story takes us back to where it all began when a young Scooby and Shaggy first meet and team up with Velma, Daphne, and Fred to launch Mystery Incorporated.
Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, Valley Girl sets it’s the pace to a rock ‘n roll ’80s soundtrack. A soundtrack produced by legendary Harvey Mason, Jr. with dance numbers by choreographer Mandy Moore, Valley Girl, is a musical adaptation of the classic 1983 hit film that became a cult icon. The movie streams digitally on Amazon as well as on other platforms.
Julie, played by Jessica Rothe, is the ultimate ’80s Valley Girl. A creative free spirit, Julie’s time is spent with her best friends shopping at the Galleria mall and making plans for senior prom. That is until she falls hard for Randy, played by Joshua Whitehouse, who is a Sunset Strip punk rocker and challenges everything the Valley and Julie stand for. Despite push-back from friends and family, Julie must break out of the safety of her world to follow her heart and discover what it means to be a Valley Girl.
Camila Marrone and Alicia Silverstone star in Valley Girl.
The movie also stars Jessie Ennis, Ashleigh Murray, Chloe Bennet, Logan Paul, Mae Whitman, Mario Revolori, Rob Huebel, Judy Greer, Alicia Silverstone, and Camila Morrone.
Directed by returning franchise filmmaker Kyle Balda, Minions: The Rise of Gru begins with the untold story of one 12-year-old’s dream to become the world’s greatest supervillain, voiced by Steve Carell.
The movie brings swarming subversive humor, pop-culture sophistication, full-hearted emotion, bold music sensibility, and over-the-top action.
Written and directed by Jon Stewart, Irresistible brings a flare of comedy about a Democrat political consultant, played by Steve Carell,) who helps a retired Marine colonel, played by Chris Cooper, run for mayor in a small Wisconsin town.
Written and directed by Michael Winterbottom with Sean Gray adding material to the story, Greed is a satire on the very wealthy. Not much is being promoted about the movie, but it is a British comedy, and this is the seventh collaboration between Winterbottom and Steve Coogan.
The next two clips show what the movie will entail. The humor is dry, and the situations hilarious.
Co-directed by Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole and starring Morgan Saylor, Sophie Lowe with June Squibb and Margo Martindale, the movie, Blow the Man Down, begins at Easter Cove. It is a salty fishing village on the far reaches of Maine’s rocky coast.
Grieving the loss of their mother and facing an uncertain future, Mary Beth and Priscilla Connolly cover up a gruesome run-in with a dangerous man. They conceal their crime, and the sisters must go deeper into Easter Cove’s underbelly and uncover the town matriarchs’ darkest secrets.
Directed by Armando Iannucci, we follow the story based on Charles Dickens’ classic tale of grit and determination. Dev Patel plays the lead role in The Personal History of David Copperfield. The studio calls it re-imagines of Charles Dickens’ story, giving it a comedic lens of the Dickensian tale.
Still, a remake is a remake, even though they say “new life of the story for a cosmopolitan age with a diverse ensemble cast of stage and screen actors from across the world.”
Armando Iannucci also co-wrote the screenplay with Simon Blackwell. They seem to lend their wry, yet heart-filled storytelling style to revisiting Dickens’ iconic hero on his quirky journey from impoverished orphan to the burgeoning writer in Victorian England.
Other cast members include Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton.
Directed by the elusively funny Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch is a love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in “The French Dispatch” magazine.
The cast is an A-list of Hollywood superstars, including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Billy Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody and Benicio Del Toro.
According to IMDB, The New Yorker reported a piece that outlines some characters, subjects, and situations described in this movie, along with the corresponding The New Yorker articles, themes, and writers that Wes Anderson references. These include:
Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Bill Murray, inspired by the New Yorker’s founding editor Harold Ross.
Herbsaint Sazerac, played by Owen Wilson, inspired by the writer Joseph Mitchell
Julian Cadazio, played by Adrien Brody, inspired by Lord Duveen, the subject of a 1951 six-part New Yorker profile by S. N. Behrman
Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright, inspired by James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling, who were both New Yorker contributors over the years.
Lucinda Krementz, played by Frances McDormand, inspired by Mavis Gallant, She wrote a two-part 1968 piece on the student uprisings in France. This character also shares a last name with Jill Krementz, a photographer whose work has often appeared in the New Yorker and is the widow of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
The New Yorker also reported in the same piece that the movie takes place in a fictional French town called “Ennui-sur-Blasé.” “Ennui” and “blasé” are both English words, albeit both terms originate from the French, which means roughly the same thing: world-weary boredom, apathy, and sophistication. It is relatively common for French place names to contain the word “sur” (“on”) between two other words as a geographic descriptor. for example, the French Riviera village name “Beaulieu-sur-Mer” translates as “beautiful place on the sea.” So if it were a real place name, “Ennui-sur-Blasé” would mean, more or less, “Boredom-on-Apathy.”
For Anderson, the filmmaking process is 100% organic from start to finish. That begins with the writing. “It’s a real adventure to work on these things,” says longtime collaborator Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote the story with Anderson and Roman Coppola and plays the role of the magazine’s cartoonist. “The stories are sort of concocted in real-time. There’s not some big outline or something that you’re filling in. You’re literally creating each moment as you get to it. It’s sort of like building a bridge while you’re on the bridge, and that’s what’s really exciting. When you wake up in the morning, you really have no idea what could happen to the story, to the characters, and that is such an exciting place to be. It’s free form but focused, and Wes is the captain of the ship.”
So funny!
The official name of the New Yorker-inspired magazine is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, a publication inspired by the history of The New Yorker and the origins of two of the people who made it what it is: Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder, and William Shawn, his successor, both inspirations for Bill Murray’s character and both born in the Midwest. “Kansas seems to me like the most American place in America,” says Anderson. “I mean, really, in the end, The French Dispatch isn’t publishing for the people of Kansas. They’re publishing for America.”
Creating the story’s striking still-life passages, Anderson actually asked the actors to freeze in place. “It’s a game I play with my daughter,” says del Toro, “it’s probably one of the earliest things that I remember playing as a kid, and suddenly… we’re doing it, every actor from Tilda Swinton to Henry Winkler, all these legends, all playing the game. And it’s contagious. It’s really nice to see actors going back to their childhood and playing, Simon Says. There’s something very freeing about it. And I felt like it added to the film in another way. Wes could have frozen the action digitally, but there’s something about the actors actually freezing that makes it… you can feel it, you can touch it, and the audience can feel the joy behind it.”
See if you can catch every single actor in this movie.
Written by Jesse Armstrong and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, Downhill stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Will Ferrell, Miranda Otto, Zach Woods, Zoë Chao, Julian Grey, Ammon Jacob Ford, and Kristofer Hivju.
The movie is an adaptation of the 2014 Golden Globe-nominated Swedish film Force Majeure. Barely escaping an avalanche during a ski vacation in the Alps throws the seemingly picture-perfect family into disarray as they forced to reevaluate life and how they genuinely feel about each other.
The movie is available on disc formats as well as streaming.
Said Julia Louis-Dreyfus from the set: “(I’m) thrilled to have completed my first day of filming with Jim and Nat and Will Ferrell and my friends at Likely Story here in Austria; it’s all downhill from here.”
“Obviously, Searchlight is like family at this point,“ said directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. “We’re honored to be working with them for the third time. But, to also have our paths cross with Julia, and a fellow Groundling alum in Will makes this all the more special and exciting for us.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is fantastic in the next movie clip, and Ferrell plays off her so nicely.
I am not quite sure what is happening here in this scene, but I guess it is right before the avalanche.
